Several years ago, legislators signed off on the Patriot Act
in knee-jerk fashion, and many of them hadn’t even read the document. The reason?
Well, first, the nation was in a state of fear, so obviously some piece
of legislation had to be passed immediately—that’s just what lawmakers
do. And second, it was named the Patriot
Act. You would have to be unpatriotic
not to get on board, right? Anyway, that
was a case of great branding. Had it
been named the Government Spying Act, or the Invasion of Privacy Act, fewer
people would have supported it (although, I think it still would have passed). And now, this same branding phenomenon is
playing out, only in reverse, with Obama-Care, a/k/a the Affordable Care
Act.
Being self-employed I have purchased my own healthcare
insurance for the last twelve years, so I am directly affected by the Affordable
Care Act. (Unfortunately, it appears
that I will be negatively affected with regard to both my healthcare options
and the price I’ll have to pay, but that’s another story.) When I discuss the new law with people, I
always avoid using the term Obama-Care. Why? Because it feels incredibly
derogatory rolling off the tongue. My
thinking is that if I use the term, anyone in earshot would immediately brand
me a TEA Party member or at least a conservative republican; therefore, they
wouldn’t take seriously any thoughtful criticisms that I have about the law.
My feelings on the term Obama-Care were recently confirmed. Yesterday, I was listening to a business /
politics podcast that said, when surveyed, the people who were asked if they
supported the Affordable Care Act were much more likely to respond “yes”
than those who were asked if they supported Obama-Care. This was not at all surprising (although it
is troubling that people are so easily swayed by labels and emotion,
rather than by facts and substance).
I had always just chalked up the term Obama-Care to
brilliant Republican strategy. Surely, such a derogatory term must have been hatched by the right-wingers. But then I heard the surprising part of the
podcast: the term Obama-Care actually came from (or at least was embraced by) the
Obama administration. This was hard to
believe, but then the podcast played clip after clip of people from the Obama
camp, including the president himself, using the term.
Calling the new law Obama-Care might be the worst branding
effort in history. The Obama camp has
since retreated: they now refer to it only by its real name, and have wisely abandoned the term Obama-Care.
But the Obama camp shouldn’t have needed a study or survey to know
that the Affordable Care Act is a far better name. After all, we know that people are easily
swayed by labels and their emotional reactions to those labels. And what’s better than having affordable
healthcare? Of course people would
support something called the Affordable Care Act.
To oppose it would border on the unpatriotic.
To oppose it would border on the unpatriotic.
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